Talking Tech and Holograms with Mark Zuckerberg!

Oh, so you must have been like one of the first people on YouTube, so I would consider myself like in the second wave of YouTube, there are a lot of YouTubers like from 2007, yeah, that's like when it started, I was 2009. Okay. It's been amazing, it's been a journey for this, what's up with mkbhd here? So quick background, uh, before you go to the comments section and say hey, why didn't you also talk about this or why didn't you question him about this policy or this? electoral things and you know there is a lot to talk about.

I'm sure if we'd had a two-hour podcast episode we would have gotten to a lot more, but he's a busy guy and we had originally scheduled to allocate 15 minutes to talk.

tech

nology, so my thought was if we only had 15 minutes to talk

tech

nology with Mark Zuckerberg, what would we talk about anyway? This is that conversation, enjoy, okay Mark, what's up, great, how are you? Thanks for inviting me, yes, I am. Well, for the

talking

technology series, I think we always start with an introduction. I don't know if you need an introduction for this audience, but I think people know you as the co-founder of Facebook, the face of Facebook, but I.

I'll let you introduce yourself to what your role is each day and what that's like for you yeah, well, I guess I started the company and I've been running it for the last 16 years and you know, I think you know my job is nice. varied, you know, I never really know when I wake up in the morning what, you know, what's going to be thrown at me that day, but overall it's a really interesting mix of intellectual problems and, you know, just me. I am grateful to have the opportunity to create things that so many people around the world love and use every day;

It ranges from knowing the suite of apps you could have on your phone to some more far-reaching advanced technologies like the work we're doing in virtual and augmented reality, which is personally one of the things I'm most excited about. We have these ads coming out on Facebook. Tune in about some of the new work we're doing that's actually really interesting. Do you usually divide your time between Facebook, Instagram, uh, Oculus, WhatsApp or is it like every day has a little bit of everything? Yeah, I definitely split my time up a little bit more because there are so many pieces at this point that if I was trying to tune into everything every day then it would be too much context switching, so actually what I try to do is have a theme for a week and, you know, maybe I can't normally get away with it. one topic, but I'll try to do two or three things in a week and focus most of my time on getting it done and doing a good job at it, then of course different things will come up that I'm

talking

about. people throughout the day, but you know we have very good people running each of the applications, you know it works well as a team and that allows me to focus on some of the things that I think are the most important and Anything that's coming up It's something that I have to deal with, so I think one of the most interesting parts of the talking technology series when I talk to people is that everyone has a unique perspective on technology in some way and obviously you're the In front of a very important company like Oculus, that's what interests me the most because in front of it you have to have some kind of vision of what you think the future is, which I suppose is difficult for I would like to understand it, but what? you can talk a little bit about Oculus now, like Oculus Quest 2 by the time this comes out it's going to be the newest, latest and greatest, but what does that future roadmap look like for a company like Oculus, yeah?

If you look at the kind of broad history of technology, we get these new major technology platforms every 15 years or so and each one offers a more immersive experience and allows us to communicate with the people, companies and things we care about all over the world. world. world with just greater fidelity and when I look at what we have today, you know in our phones, you know, phones are pretty amazing, right? You have this incredibly powerful computer in your pocket, but it's not the end of the line, it's all there. these things that I think are not so good, right, it takes you away from the world around you, it's anything but immersive, right, it's a small screen, so the question I've been asking is: do you know what the next wave is? of technology and what the next platform is going to be and what it's going to offer about how we all connect and to me the essence of virtual and augmented reality is that you need to have a technology that provides this sense of presence right in the feeling that we actually , you're there with another person and all the different sensations that come with that, usually not just seeing someone on a screen, but you have the spatial audio, so it sounds like someone is standing there, the audio is coming from there.

Um, having it so that you can tell if you're interacting with them and you have an object, you can pass the object to them correctly and it's real time and there's no latency, you know, our eyes update every five. or ten milliseconds so you know you can have this whole 3D world and what other people are doing, render it in real time faster than that, so it feels real, I think that's different on any other type of technology platform that We've had, you know, game consoles on TVs, computers, you get some pretty amazing software, but you're basically trying to convince your brain all the time that you're in a different context than you actually are when you're actually. just sitting on your couch or at your desk vr and ar are the first platform where you really convince your system that you are in a different place, you almost have to try to convince yourself to snap out of reality sometimes and i realize Mind you, hey, this isn't actually real.

I'm in a different physical location, but that's pretty powerful, so there's a long line of technology that we need to develop to fully deliver that sense of presence, but I think that's really where we're at. What we're going to do with the Oculus virtual reality product lines and with the augmented reality glasses that we'll be working on in the next few years is how can we bring that sense of presence and connection to people, yeah, you know, believe. I like that way of thinking, a question I get asked a lot is how I make videos now on YouTube and my goal is always to make videos of the highest quality possible so I can put a product in front of you and it looks as realistic as possible. , almost like you're holding yourself up, but what's the next version?

Maybe the next version of the technical reviews in 10 years after your YouTube videos and my natural response has been: I think VR makes more sense if I could literally. Kind of like putting yourself in my shoes and then you'll feel like you're in the car I'm driving or holding the phone I'm holding. It's a stupid answer. Have I been giving a good answer all this time? I mean, I certainly agree with that, but you know, I mean our company is probably the most invested in virtual and augmented reality than anyone else in the world, so, yeah, I mean, I hope within ten or five years you meet people.

You'll have a, you know, relatively stylish pair of glasses that you can put on and basically carry around to your studio where you are and instead of just holding the phone in front of you like you just did, they could grab it so you can hand it to them. for them and they can, they can play with it and experience that themselves or maybe the lighter version of that would be augmented reality, which you know, I think you're still going to have to get into some kind of different mode. wanting to put on sunglasses or goggles and have that totally immersive virtual experience for virtual reality, but I think augmented reality once it comes along and you have a normal pair of glasses that, you know, are normal, pretty glasses, no, nothing of that. super thick or something and it can last all day but can project

holograms

into the world.

Then you can do a version of your show where you know your hologram can appear on my couch right here. um and you can hand me the phone and I can and I can take the phone like a hologram and play with it like that um you know I mean a kind of mind blowing thing that I think is further away is once we have really good glasses to adults, we won't even necessarily need other types of screens anymore, things like televisions, you know, they're tablets, all of these things could just be digital

holograms

, they could be apps you know, some kid on the other side of the world and some.

It's made elsewhere and you'll be able to get completely new designs for things like TVs and different types of shapes that aren't like the normal things that you know Samsung can make in their factory and I think. that there's going to be a lot of creativity that's going to be unlocked and a lot of innovation when a lot of things that physically today have to be produced in a factory that obviously most people don't have access to do it um can. just become an app that can be a hologram that you can give to someone. I think that's going to be crazy so I'm really excited and that's why we're so focused on this and do you know thousands of people working on this at Facebook because I think this is going to be the next major computing platform even if does it take you several years to get there properly?

So do you see a world where maybe where screens or displays are kind of the past where you can literally project with AR, if the technology is good enough, you can hold it like a rock or whatever, like a very simple object and economical and with your ar turn it into a screen if that makes sense. You know, I mean the real thing is always going to have a higher amount of fidelity than you're going to be able to get with um with augmented, I mean, haptics are an area where you know you want to feel something, you pick up a rock or an object. and it has more weight, that's a little difficult to model, but I think we're going to get other senses through virtual and augmented reality that maybe aren't possible in the physical world, so let's say, for example, okay, I'm like me.

I'm like feeling at my desk and my hand approaches a water bottle where today you don't feel the water bottle until you touch it, but it's possible that in AR or VR we can provide some kind of sense so that you start approaching a object, you start to feel some kind of resistance or some kind of sensation that you are close to something um which of course has other animals um you know, navigating the world through sonar and different things like that take on a sense of difference , so I think it's going to be pretty wild.

I think many new things will be possible. Not that it's going to replace all physical things, of course, there aren't many things you still have. it has to be physical, but you know a lot of different types of media, books, games, different things that people have, televisions, it's actually not clear that in the future all of those need to be physical objects, I think a lot of them, you know , yes You are sitting next to me, your hologram is here with me, you know? And maybe another friend is sitting next to you on the couch with a hologram from somewhere else and we want to play a card game and I can just snap and here's a virtual deck of cards and I can deal them right, it's like I think it's going to be pretty wild, um, yeah, so I think it's going to be really powerful, but obviously there's a lot more technology that we need. develop before we can get there, I understand you, look, that's why it was a good idea to talk to you because I'm not thinking that far into the future and now I'm fine, you have to address all your senses, you know your sense of sight , your sense of hearing, but you can also introduce new senses, which is a little crazy, but here's a question I've been wondering.

I could go with ar or vr um, what do you think it's more important for? people need to embrace this technology uh the actual quality of the technology and the experience itself or the minimization of the form factor because I think you mentioned before that the glasses maybe have a thicker rim but not too thick and are relatively little obstructive. Is that so important or what do you focus on first? Well, I think it's a little bit different between virtual reality and augmented reality for virtual reality because a lot of people know that you're doing it at home or you're doing it. in an area where you are, it's quite reasonable to be completely immersed, you know, appearance is not, I think the most important factor, right, I think if we were talking about people walking down the street wearing a virtual reality headset.

I think that would be a different situation, but that doesn't work. You don't want to be completely immersed in another world where you're walking down the street, that's where augmented reality comes in, so I think for virtual reality. It's all these reasons why you want to make it smaller, right, you want to make it more portable, um, of course, you want to make it more comfortable, the lighter it is, the more comfortable it will be.for people to use and of course, Of course, anything that people are going to use, you want it to be cool, you want it to look cool on the inside when you worry about what the headphones that you're wearing look like.Look closely, it's like you know you probably like the design of them, so it's something that matters and that's something we work on.

I think there will be a whole new threshold. You know, because it's meant to be used. and you're interacting with the world around you and just bringing holograms into the world which I think has a very high bar for the kind of aesthetics and um and you feel like they're a normal pair of glasses so you know they are if you think about the range of glasses from very thin frame glasses to fairly thick frame glasses, I don't know if we'll be able to fit all the electronics into very thin frame glasses any time soon, but the goal will be to try to get them all. the electronics and the things we need to produce that in kind of a normal pair of thick-framed glasses, I think that matters, but in the meantime, for virtual reality, you know, we just want it to be as light as possible, so for mission two.

The target, you know, we got it ten percent lighter than mission one, right, we took about 60 grams off of it and made it so that it's not only lighter, but it's also smaller, so, yeah You know, it's the headphone piece. smaller but also the strap is soft instead of the hard strap which when he was a little heavier he needed a hard strap so the weight distribution would work on his head so the harder strap could work. of support, but now that it's lighter we crossed the threshold where you can get the soft strap, that has a double benefit because now the soft strap makes it much smaller so I can throw it in my backpack when I'm out.

It is much easier to travel on the go and makes it much more portable, making it functional. Look, that kind of stuff really matters and we're definitely going to continue focusing on smaller, faster processors, better displays all the way to retina. screens, we were also able to reduce the price from 399 to 299, which I think will make it possible for a lot more people to access them and access virtual reality, and that's something that I'm really excited about as well when Every time I think about ar, I think that my brain naturally goes back to Google Glass in the past and I'm curious when you think about the future of what you want it to look like, do you ever look back at the past?

It was Google Glass ahead of its time, well, I think the idea that you're going to want to have some information and context there, I think it makes sense to work on that, but I think you'll see other types of glasses. sal, I imagine you know, I don't know what Apple and others are working on, but no, there is a version that technology can take, that I think you can put, you can think of it. a smartwatch on your face, so it's like what do you use your smartwatch for? You know, notifications. You know, maybe some information and maybe you could have that in the corner of your eye.

It would be interesting. Yes, I think there is something. People might like that's not what I'm personally very excited about building it for a few reasons. One is that I do it from the perspective of how do we better connect people so that you know have some type of information. the corner of my eye is different, it's just not as powerful from my perspective, it's being able to have a hologram of Marquez here with me um and being able to interact and share objects or physically play a game. together, I think it's like a completely different value proposition that will be harder to build, but I think it's worth waiting for it to get to that, so I think you'll see different things.

Last time Google was kind of an Early Adopter type of smartwatch with a face and, um, I don't know, I'm sure others will try it too. That's, um, you know, that's not the main thing we're focused on trying. to build, I got you, so I got a little bit of rapid fire, a little bit, yeah, a little bit, this or that, questions and uh, we'll see what you think, okay, algorithmic or chronological, ooh, well, I mean, I feel that I am some kind of algorithmic. boy, so, um, yeah, I mean, look, there's a place for both of us at the end of the day, if your cousin or someone you know has a baby or some milestone happens, it's like you're expected to see it. that and people get mad when they miss it because you know they were 40 posts down because it was in chronological order, so I think the ranking is more valuable.

The other thing we just found out is that when we did everything chronological. It basically encouraged people to spam because a lot of pages were like, "Oh, I could get to the top just by posting stuff really frequently, so I think it's like having an option to see things chronologically in a world where most of the pages I hope your content has to be categorized and therefore it has to be good content. It's valuable, it's a good balance, but making it all chronological, I think it produces some negative effects. Understood, I feel like that's it. the sensible algorithmic answer I prefer a good algorithmic one over the chronological one uh favorite non-Facebook app um well, I mean I'm in the purple air a lot these days, but I don't know if that's a good thing, I mean, that's because california wildfires is the air quality app, I think so, I mentioned Spotify before I probably spend more time on Spotify than almost any other app I really like music.

I think Daniel is a great entrepreneur and a. good person. Forks. a good company and I think they have done a great job with the work of it, well, phone in your pocket right now. You know, I've been using Samsung phones for a few years now and I'm a big fan. of them and you know, I think they build fantastic phones. I like Android. I also think you know someone who is building a company where you know billions of people around the world use our products. You know that most of them use Android phones. so I think it's pretty good for me and the company's management team to have exposure to using different Android phones instead of just having iPhones, which would probably be the default for many years.

Friends the ultimate hickory smoked craft barbecue or the sweet baby run I mean it's even a question is uh I mean I think it's well known on the internet that I'm a sweet fan raised by babies um I I I like it barbecue um and I guess I'm a sweet fanboy raised like a baby. It's fair to say Mark, thanks for joining me. I appreciate the time. I know you're a busy guy, so I appreciate you taking the minutes you spend with me and I look forward to it. Take all this new knowledge about the future of virtual reality and augmented reality with me.

Great, okay, thanks for inviting me to appreciate it. See you.